


spent my whole life trying to put it into words

by aceofdiamonds



Series: is that such a stretch of the imagination? [18]
Category: Gossip Girl, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 04:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11267508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aceofdiamonds/pseuds/aceofdiamonds
Summary: But sometimes — sometimes she slips in a cryptic tweet that has her followers scrabbling to work it out or she types out song lyrics that fit with how she’s feeling and she presses send as Harry hooks his chin over her shoulder and hums along. Twitter isn’t seeing that part of her but she has to keep them interested.blair incorporates more of her personal life into her social media platforms.





	spent my whole life trying to put it into words

**Author's Note:**

> i was watching instagram stories this morning and, for the first time in a while actually, my mind leapt to harry and blair. this is fluffy to the point of being unbearable tbh but that's how i think of them. please disregard any magic/technology difficulties and Please don't even pretend to try and work out a timeline. i've given up. title is from you are in love by taylor swift, because, like i said, the fluff is that strong.

 

 

After the invasiveness of Gossip Girl, the presence it had in her formative years, the many ways it’s ruined her life, destroyed her friends, it could be understood that Blair wouldn’t have an interest in social media and its many facets. 

But that’s not how it is. 

Blair loves social media — she adores following fashion bloggers on Instagram and looking at bold new ways to style things she’s never gone near before. She double-taps these girls with long long legs and girls with round bodies and girls with hairstyles she’d never try out in a million years but that she finds aesthetically pleasing, however much she hates that phrase. She expands the fashion perimeters set up for her when she was fifteen and in high school and her designs expand and grow accordingly. 

She doesn’t like Twitter as much; having a private account feels like she has something to hide but posting private thoughts on a public forum where she has hundreds of thousands of followers isn’t something she likes much either. She settles for becoming one of those people who mainly tweets links to new style collections, to new Instagram posts, to other places to reach her outside of this 140 character constrained space. Blair Waldorf has nothing to say that is small enough to fit in 140 characters or less.  

But sometimes — sometimes she slips in a cryptic tweet that has her followers scrabbling to work it out or she types out song lyrics that fit with how she’s feeling and she presses send as Harry hooks his chin over her shoulder and hums along. Twitter isn’t seeing that part of her but she has to keep them interested. 

When she can’t help but show-off her adorable baby, though, she turns to Snapchat where she has a smaller, more controlled, amount of followers. She lies on her back on the couch in their living room, Isla balanced on her stomach, and they scroll through the filters, both of them giggling at the giant glasses, at the bright pink wig, at the distorted chin, that disguise Isla safely enough Blair adds them to her story. They send them to Harry who comes in from work and makes Blair have a turn, posing with the Marilyn birthmark, with a crown of her own face, and he sets Isla as his home screen, Blair as his lock screen, and carries them around with him as he travels across the Atlantic.

(Blair doesn't allow filters to cloud the picture that is currently her lock screen. She has Harry grinning into the camera, Isla’s cheek pressed against his, her hand reaching out for Blair behind the camera, and, even when she rarely has her phone out of her hand, it makes her heart clench with love every time she sees it.)

At a meeting someone tentatively suggests that Blair opens up a little more on her various platforms, maybe look at what the most successful fashion bloggers do, take outfit of the day pictures, show how Blair Waldorf: star designer, styles her own clothes, what beauty products she’s been loving, what books, TV, music she’s been consuming. And in the stories section, incorporate some of her personal life, the parts she hasn’t always shared after she cut herself off from the reach of Gossip Girl. The stories delete in 24 hours but they’ll give people a glimpse into her life, they’ll humanise her, and it’ll do wonders for her base, trust them.  

For someone who hated unnecessary attention and who shied away from public events, his return from Italy has turned Harry around -- he's not suddenly phoning up newspapers for exclusive interviews or anything like that, but with so few wizards jumping on the charming their phones to bypass any magic technicalities bandwagon, he has a relatively small following, one he likes to keep updated on things he finds interesting, even if it’s not what everyone wants to hear from their boy who lived, their star Seeker. 

The Weasleys and his teammates appear frequently, usually in some state of annoyance at being photographed whilst in the middle of doing something, the candidness something Harry craves. He takes pictures of buildings in Manhattan, London, the various towns and cities he visits for matches; he shoots five-second videos of a Snitch hovering above goal posts, of their cat stretching along the window seat, of sparks shooting from his wand which he then edits with various filters to alter the colours and to show that magic and technology _can_ mix, if only in these small, mundane ways. But for the most part, he creates a haphazard timeline of his life with Blair and his daughter, a stream of photos trickling onto his feed slowly at first as he becomes more confident with his family being exposed this way and then a slew of Isla’s drawings, recordings of her talking, her first steps a short video nestled between everything else he wants to show the world.   

And then there’s Blair -- he’s all for this idea of increasing her online presence to market herself, he’s said from the start that she deserves the world and more, and that he’s more than confident in her ability to take it, and he loves this world of social media (again, Hermione’s confused he’s such an advocate for an almost constant access to public figures, but, Hermione, he says, the war is over and look how connected everyone can be, the Muggles are really onto something here) that can enhance and spread everything she’s worked on. So half of his posts are centred around Blair’s business, urging people to go and take a look, there’s something for everyone, and yes he’s biased but isn’t she amazing? (The other half are candid shots of Blair smiling, of Blair working, of Blair sitting holding Isla with the cat on one side and Teddy on the other, of Blair laughing with Dan, of Blair laughing with Serena, of Blair playing a board game with Ginny, Nate, George, and Teddy, of Blair and Isla in Hogsmeade -- you get the idea.) 

So Blair, with rolled eyes and an air of reluctance, tries including her life on social media and finds that one: she enjoys it and two: her followers increase and traffic on her websites explode. 

A video: Blair on Harry’s shoulders at a concert in Central Park Blair can’t even remember the name of, and the quality of the video won’t do much good in helping her figure it out. The camera flicks between the messy top of Harry’s head, to the ground, to the stage, to the plastic cup of wine in her hand. God, a cup of wine and squashed in between hundreds of New Yorkers? She barely recognises herself. When she watches the video back, though, the main element is her laughing, loud and uninhibited (and, let’s face it, more than a little inebriated), and, hey, laughing with your husband is relatable, right? 

A picture: An OOTD taken in front of the an old stone building, a hand lifted to hold the hair out of her face, a small smile, sunglasses hiding her frustration at Harry’s inability to take a photo. “I’m a wizard,” he tells her, negating everything he’s said about assimilating so well with Muggles. “We don’t use phones, and, by the way, our pictures move.” “So do ours,” Blair replies sweetly, adjusting her skirt and turning another way, gesturing for Harry to take another one. “They’re called videos.” 

A picture: A very pregnant Blair surrounded by maternity clothes in every style and colour. She stands with her hands on the small of her back, feet apart, her bump huge and round, a frown on her face as she glares at the discarded clothes. There’s a caption: A con of growing a life inside of you is that no nice clothes fit. A follow-up: Blair in a pair of Harry’s joggies and a sweatshirt, pieces of paper strewn around the floor. The caption this time: So you have to make your own. (B’s maternity line is a huge success.)  

A series: Harry on his birthday, a candle stuck in a treacle tart in front of him, a smile crinkling his eyes (a 3 second video, a cut off happy birthday as Isla drops the phone); Serena on her birthday, a rooftop bar, cocktails, an unusually calm celebration but hey, they're thirty now, classy cocktails is all they want; Isla’s birthday, more videos than usual, everyone carefully obscured but there are balloons, there's cake, dainty sandwiches, a suspicious amount of something that could be called magic if anyone ever considered thinking that way; Blair’s birthday, a sunny Italy in the background of every picture, a somewhat soppy post about Harry taking her back to the place they met for her thirtieth birthday because he’s just so fucking romantic, isn’t he the best? (That post is written after a few too many glasses of champagne; she plans to take it down in the morning when she comes to her senses but she hesitates, scrolls through the comments, where people are sending heart eye emojis, every colour of heart, and countless wishes of happy birthdays, even more of how sweet she and Harry are, and, of course, she doesn’t need validation in this form, but something stops her from deleting the post. It’s a good picture.)

A video: A glance over Blair’s sketchbook, the barest bones of her designs. (She’s advised not to show too much for fear of her sketches being spoiled but opinions and suggestions and comments all come pouring in, exclamation marks and heart emojis punctuating every other word, and Blair scrolls through them, reads the feedback, and listens. Maybe Harry’s right about this being the future, Gossip Girl and any other nastiness aside, this instant communication is great.)

A picture: The extended Weasley family: The Next Generation plus Teddy and Sam, Nate and Autumn’s son, standing in a line each with a Weasley jumper on, letters sewn on the backs which they proudly show the camera. Blair puts one version of the photo on her story and another on her feed, and a few eagle-eyed followers comment in confusion over the fact that the tallest boy, the one at the end with the T on his jumper, has pink hair in one picture and blue in the other, despite the fact that the picture is taken seconds apart. Blair doesn’t comment but asks Teddy to change his hair every time she takes a photo, just to keep things interesting. It’s an easy way of seeing what colours and fabrics suit what hair colours as well, so, a win-win. 

A series: 'Do What I Tell You' she calls it, as though she has time at the moment to consume anything that isn't to do with the show or Isla. But every so often she'll put up a picture of a stack of books, gives a sweeping recommendation ("Michael Chabon for the writing, Emily St. John Mandel for the plot, and V.E Schwab if you feel like pretending magic exists," because slipping in references to magic has become a small thing she loves to do, like she's winking at the world from the inside of a joke.) or she'll post a picture of a blurry screen and caption it: Community, nothing else, and then she laughs at the references that come flooding in. Sometimes she'll play a song, a bit of Betty Who or Haim, and maybe she'll quietly sing along. 

A video: A tired Blair with her head resting on her hand, the phone at a low angle as she struggles to keep her eyes open. “This looks bad,” she mumbles, stifling a yawn, “but this part, with the show so close and everything is close to falling apart --” she zooms the camera into her tired eyes. “--it’s my favourite. This is when I remember how much I love it.” Something happens off-screen, a shout, an argument. Blair smiles. “Anyway, you’ll see it all soon. Goodnight.”

A picture: Of Serena, Nate, and Dan sitting at the steps of The Met because nostalgia makes fools of all of us. The picture doesn’t capture the discussion they had, the bickering, the laughing, but it shows three of those five kids who thought they ruled the city (well, four plus Dan, no matter how hard he tried.) One’s behind the camera and one’s disappeared off the face of the earth but those who have been following Gossip Girl all these years get the idea -- despite everything thrown at them, they’ve made it into adulthood, and, with everything that happened, that feels a lot like winning a game they don’t care about anymore. Blair doesn’t bother reading the comments that come through for this one -- she tucks her phone into her bag and pushes Nate’s shoulder when he makes a comment about getting dirt on her dress. 

A video: Ron talking behind the camera, muttering about Muggle technology and how, to be honest, he prefers Errol to this, see, he’s just pressed the wrong button again. He zooms in on Harry and Blair standing in the sunshine, Isla linking them. Ron shifts the phone so it catches Harry and Blair lifting Isla in a swing, her legs kicking and her squeals of delight clear in the video. The phone doesn’t pick up whatever Blair says to Harry but it catches his laugh and it tracks him picking Isla up, resting her on his hip, and pulling Blair against his side. Of course, this is when Ron somehow, probably accidentally, screenshots the moment and they freeze. It’s one of the times Harry says he’s glad Muggle photographs don’t move because this is a perfect moment. (‘You’ve all become disgustingly sentimental, Ron says, ‘I expected this from you, Harry, but Blair, you’ve really surprised me.”) 

A picture: Blair struggles to keep up her Outfit of the Days but that’s what the fans want, so, with more practice, Harry becomes a very willing, very good, photographer, lining her up with the light and the various plants/cars/birds surrounding her. “You’re a natural, babe,” he shouts, finger click click clicking. “You ever think about modeling?” he simpers, wand waving to straighten the branches behind Blair (look at him, so dedicated to her art) “because I know a guy.” “I’m not being put on the side of your stadium with your name across my back,” Blair says, checking her reflection in her sunglasses. “So please stop asking.” (Later, she puts on his Tornadoes jersey with the Potter emblazoned on the back because he likes it and because she likes the way he shows his enthusiasm. It’s all about give and take, you know, and he really is a surprisingly good photographer, she has to keep him around somehow.)

A picture: A blurred photo of Harry and Blair, Harry kissing Blair’s cheek, her arm around his shoulders, the other hand reaching out for the phone as Isla dances out of reach. (Despite loving this whole experiment with the stories more than she expected to, Blair still keeps them in their self-destruct in 24 hours space, leaving the rest of her Instagram for catwalk looks and general information about her business, but this one makes it onto a permanent place on her feed, the caption made up of sparkly hearts because hasn’t she said already, she really loves this man and the tiny person behind the camera.)

 

 

 


End file.
